The faces of modern slavery: Ipswich attorney battles trafficking scourge

Saturday

Aug 12, 2017 at 6:41 PMAug 12, 2017 at 6:41 PM

Dan Mac Alpine ipswich@wickedlocal.com @ipswich_chron

The crew replacing the roof. The landscapers. The team that comes and cleans the house.

These workers could all be the faces of modern slavery. Coerced into working for little or no pay either through physical abuse, threats, fraud and/or manipulation. In other words, they could be trafficked -- and too afraid to step up for their own human rights.

Water Street resident Vard Johnson, an immigration lawyer for 30 years and a practicing lawyer for 54, recommends two simple steps to help ensure average homeowners support legitimate contractors and keep away from what essentially are enslaved workers.

Those two simple steps are:

Ask the contractor for proof of liability insurance.

Ask the contractor for proof of worker's compensation insurance.

“If you do those things,” Johnson said, “you might not get the roofer, but you would have done every piece of due diligence that I think you could do.”

Of course, that due diligence doesn’t touch the biggest driver of human trafficking in towns like Ipswich, the state, across the United States and the globe: the sex trade.

“Because human trafficking also covers involuntary prostitution,” Johnson said, “and given the prevalence of prostitution in our society, I can’t help but believe there are victims of human trafficking in Ipswich.

“Any man who wants to engage in prostitution has to ask, ‘Why would I do this? Am I going to harm her? Why am I putting this woman in jeopardy?’ It’s a moral question for me.”

Johnson estimates the scope of all human trafficking runs into the millions around the world and in the “hundreds of thousands” in the United States.

The U.S. Department of State’s June 2017 report, calls human trafficking, “The face of modern slavery.”

And that report says that face includes:

Sex traffickingChild sex traffickingForced laborBonded labor or debt bondage in which someone works to pay off a debt or bond that traffickers can make nearly impossible to pay off through fees and interest ratesForced child laborUse and recruitment of child soldiers.

“Sex trafficking is only one part of human trafficking,” Johnson said. “It includes labor trafficking. People being forced through some sort of intimidation to themselves or or their family members to work in involuntary servitude.”

A 2000 law called the Trafficking Victims Protection Act is the primary U.S. tool to fight myriad forms of human trafficking, and it is the law Johnson relies on most in his practice.

The national law criminalizes human trafficking and forms the basis for prosecuting human traffickers in the United States.

Massachusetts passed its own anti-trafficking law in 2011.

The Department of State reports about 4,000 new investigations into human trafficking across five different federal departments including justice, homeland security and state in 2016.

That’s up from about 3,000 investigations in 2015.

The Department of Justice reported about 400 human trafficking convictions in 2016 against 300 in 2015.

Investigation and conviction numbers, against trafficking estimates, show the battle against human trafficking,even in the United States, has a long way to go.

The Department of State's June 2017 report sets up three tiers for countries in the trafficking fight: Tier 1 countries that meet the trafficking act’s minimum standards; Tier 2 countries who are making “significant” efforts to comply; and Tier 3 countries who fail to meet minimum standards and are making no “significant efforts to do so.”

Within that three-tier system, the State Department includes a Tier 2 “watch list,” countries that have a “very significant” number of victims, who have failed to provide evidence of stepping up efforts to combat trafficking and are still “making significant efforts” to come into compliance with U.S. law “minimum standards.”

Tier 1 countries include the United States, Armenia, Austria, Australia, Germany, Poland, Spain, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.

The international nature of human trafficking often includes undocumented immigrants. Traffickers smuggle an immigrant into a country and then, instead of promised work for pay, the immigrant becomes enslaved.

But trafficking can also include legal immigration and also citizens. Traffickers can take a worker’s passport and force the person into slavery. U.S. citizens can also become part of human trafficking, either as victims or traffickers.

If a U.S. citizen were to be pimped and that pimping involved threats, violence or other forms of coercion, that qualifies as human trafficking.

“This is the face of modern slavery,” Johnson said. “This slavery has other faces than what we think of as slavery in pre-Civil-War America, but the current phase is equally shameful.”